aka T-PaB.

Chewing the Daily Bread

Very few of us know anything about loyalty to Christ…[a]ll the rest is pious fraud.

Because it’s the sort of stop-you-in-your-tracks line that makes you reevaluate, or just plain ‘valuate, all the things you’ve been casually ushering into your heart. (my heart. that’s the one I’m talking about here.)

Oh Lord, where is my pious fraud?

Where am I resisting dependence on Him? Where am I, whether absentmindedly or out of sheer unredeemed cussedness, disloyal to Jesus?

Rebellious is a sin word. Disobedient, too, and resistant. Those ones are easy to nod thoughtfully and soberly at, easy to analyze and think deeply on.

Disloyal is more. It’s personal. It’s betraying someone who trusts, someone who is owed loyalty. It stings worse. It rips my perspective from mental assent to thrust it in view of the Cross of Christ. Where my Savior was crucified, and where I am bound to follow by my choice.

Right now, the Boy and I are facing some Stuff. Like a multiple choice question where all of the above and none of the above seem like equally valid, textbook answers. I could make arguments for both sides, each seeming more Right than the last. Today as the Boy and I walked to the subway station on his way to work, we talked about the Stuff in the light of this devotional.

How about this way?

What if my response to hard things isn’t that Christ-loyal instinct? That unmistakable witness? What does that mean?

Some things are easy to surrender, but when I think about others, the only answer is an honest-as-I-can I don’t know.

It’s a learned submission, a deliberate choice, that I assume I’ve got down and thus fail to practice. But He keeps bringing me back to the brink of it. This is the loyalty of God when I don’t act like I know the meaning of the word. Have I chosen it today? in all things? Or do I yet hunker inside that brittle enclosure of human independence?